Poetry |
“We Drew Out the Feeble Language”
“Vienna in August and we walked / Klimt to Mozart, drank / Wiener wasser, a phrase that made our odd // American hearts laugh …”
Fiction |
“Family Portrait with Trees”
“From the window, a girl looks back at herself. She is six. There is a storm in her bedroom: thunder, his breathing near her ear.”
Fiction |
“I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs”
“Claudia was in Palm Springs because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs.”
Poetry |
“So Many Wars,” “The Salt Cathedral in Zipaquirá” & “Love Poem for My Brother”
“Hard to un-learn the art of leaving / when I’ve had good teachers all my life / to show me how it’s done.”
Essay |
“Irrigation Days”
“Mark caught his first wife cheating — there was even a detective involved, over from Fargo — and married his second wife right after the divorce. They were both named Tammy.”
Poetry |
“My Mother’s Hands” & “By Chance”
“These are the hands / that pour his evening drink, / the one we all know / he should not have …”
Poetry |
“The Night Children” & “If I Had Been There”
“There’s no village, no country / that isn’t being mapped / by night children with their folded wings.”
Poetry |
“sobriety”
“i can’t tell you about the drinking / unless i tell you about the past // i don’t want to tell you about the past / because then you’d see me shake”
Poetry |
“Three-Legged Dog”
“She’s overweight and quick to cry, my sister, / who licks Jiffy from a tablespoon, who wants to know / why I call her husband an asshole in front of everyone / when he enters the room.”
Essay |
“Reading Chekhov in a Pandemic”
“Chekhov is the perfect writer for our current moment: aware and tolerant of life’s ingrained inertia, he pushes us to at least challenge it.”
Poetry |
“Tosca”
“When I dream, I dream / of emptiness. I am standing at the end / of a long hallway. As at the end of Tosca, / the dead all rise again, applauded / the same …”
Poetry |
“Come into the house / Come in now!”
“the yard is / her factory / everything / calls to / her to be / made”
Essay |
“‘A Giving of the Self’: on Thom Gunn and Courtliness”
“Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself.”
Poetry |
“His Name Is Sam,” “No One’s Perfect” & “At the Church in Sacramento”
“I used to see him every week when we were kids / at the main public library. I would stare at him, wishing / he sat closer to me. Not once did I think he’d stab me.”
Literature in Translation |
“The hood of my sweatshirt,” “On the other side of the Atlantic” & “O Street”
“Here, the day I put on my blue ‘Just Do It’ / and pulled the hood over my head for shelter / from the relentless cold also running down the street, / I offered myself to death by / police. Just for the hood. And my skin.”